Media Curmudgeon

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January 9, 2008

Kristol Is Boring

There was an outcry from bloggers on The Huffington Post and other liberals about The New York Times hiring conservative pundit William Kristol as an Op-Ed columnist, so they piled on when his first column appeared with an embarrassing attribution error. But everyone missed the point – yes, he’s not a reporter; yes he’s a political hack; and, yes, he’s a wingnut supporter of the war in Iraq. The worst thing about Kristol is that he’s a terrible and boring writer.

Huffington Post blogger Marty Kaplan wrote a funny, satirical, mock-Kristol column that was much better written than Kristol’s first column. Read it instead of Kristol; you’ll learn more and laugh to boot.

As Jack Shafer points out in his Slate article, “In drafting Kristol, the Times gets a political specialist, not a journalist, similar to the deal the paper cut in 1973 when it hired PR flack and Nixon spear-chucker William Safire. Safire, a self-described libertarian conservative, weathered the same catcalls from the liberal establishment that Kristol hears today.

“I attempt no defense of Safire's "journalistic" work when I say he wrote interesting copy during his three decades on the [Times Op-Ed] page and brought to his earliest columns political perspectives that nobody else on the page—Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, James Reston, et al.—could match. As one who speaks to Republican leaders hourly, Kristol will perform similar service, rewarding liberal readers with dispatches from the ‘alien’ world of conservatism.”

Shafer makes the right point – that Safire wrote “interesting copy.” Kristol spews out dull, uninteresting, poorly written copy that contains minimal and inaccurate reporting. Even my conservative friends who hate Frank Rich and despise Maureen Dowd read their Op-Ed columns because they are journalists who do their homework, do some original reporting, and who write brilliant – often biting and caustic – copy. But, most important, they are never dull.

I applaud the Times for wanting to publish a diversity of opinion, but the editors lower their standards when they hire someone who is as poor a writer as Kristol is. In an age when the Times needs to differentiate itself from the often dull, mediocre, inaccurate, partisan reporting and writing that is widely available on the Web and in other newspapers. It isn’t helping itself by publishing ordinary, dumb writing. Is Matt Drudge the next hire?

I’d love to know what David Brooks, another conservative voice at the Times, thinks about having Kristol as an Op-Ed conservative bedfellow. Brooks is very smart and is an excellent reporter and writer. Kristol has none of those attributes. He’s boring.

Posted by Charles Warner at January 9, 2008 10:40 AM

Comments

Media Curmudgeon at January 10, 2008 8:59 AM writes:

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